FIX latency in line with other DAWs?
Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2012 12:16 am
Ableton's session view handles audio Latency differently to all other DAWS when software monitoring is turned on.
Recording in session view always places recorded Audio late on the timeline when software monitoring is on. Other DAW's including Ableton's arrange view put the audio exactly in time.
To make it easier for people to understand the problem, here is an analogy:
"Consider you are a guitarist and you are standing right beside a drummer. The two of you are playing together perfectly in time. Your guitar amp is 15 feet across the room. "
This real world scenario is exactly the same as what happens in all DAW's whilst recording with software monitoring turned on.
The drummer is analogous to the click track/pre-recorded track leaving Ableton.
The Guitarist (you) is analogous to you playing along to a click track whilst recording.
The amp 15 feet across the room is analogous to the 15 ms or so of latency you would typically experience whilst software monitoring.
So do you play 15 ms early in order to compensate for the 15 ms it takes for the sound to leave the amp and travel across the room?
No- you will play along with the drums- if you are a 'perfect' guitarist playing along with a 'perfect' drummer you will strum the guitar at the exact same moment the drums are hit. You do NOT play 15 ms early.
As it currently stands, in Abe's session view you do need to play 15ms early in order for everything to play back in time.
I understand why the Abe engineers have designed the session view and only the session view in this way. Because of the real time nature of it, (read:latency) they traded timing accuracy for timing consistency which is beneficial to those on slower machines. Imagine a DJ with a 512 buffer whose re-sampling in a club...suddenly the loop plays back 512 samples "early". It'd be even worse if he was sampling decks or whatever cos that'd be 512 in and 512 out latency.....worse still if he's monitoring with latency inducing plugins and/or latency inducing plugins on other tracks with PDC turned on. Again worse still if the previously re-sampled stuff is further re-sampled as the effect would be cumulative.
Abe decided to just circumvent all that. Which is fair enough i guess, but for those of us who have low latency and understand the signal flow and various ways in which delays can accumulate within the signal flow, it'd be nice to have the option to turn this feature/flaw off without resorting to hardware monitoring.
edit: this has nothing to do with warping "time and space" as someone suggested below! I'm not talking about eradicating inherent digital latency here, I'm talking about the audio playing back from DISK which is (iirc!) NOT dependent on time travel, vortexes, other dimensions or any other funny stuff like that.
Recording in session view always places recorded Audio late on the timeline when software monitoring is on. Other DAW's including Ableton's arrange view put the audio exactly in time.
To make it easier for people to understand the problem, here is an analogy:
"Consider you are a guitarist and you are standing right beside a drummer. The two of you are playing together perfectly in time. Your guitar amp is 15 feet across the room. "
This real world scenario is exactly the same as what happens in all DAW's whilst recording with software monitoring turned on.
The drummer is analogous to the click track/pre-recorded track leaving Ableton.
The Guitarist (you) is analogous to you playing along to a click track whilst recording.
The amp 15 feet across the room is analogous to the 15 ms or so of latency you would typically experience whilst software monitoring.
So do you play 15 ms early in order to compensate for the 15 ms it takes for the sound to leave the amp and travel across the room?
No- you will play along with the drums- if you are a 'perfect' guitarist playing along with a 'perfect' drummer you will strum the guitar at the exact same moment the drums are hit. You do NOT play 15 ms early.
As it currently stands, in Abe's session view you do need to play 15ms early in order for everything to play back in time.
I understand why the Abe engineers have designed the session view and only the session view in this way. Because of the real time nature of it, (read:latency) they traded timing accuracy for timing consistency which is beneficial to those on slower machines. Imagine a DJ with a 512 buffer whose re-sampling in a club...suddenly the loop plays back 512 samples "early". It'd be even worse if he was sampling decks or whatever cos that'd be 512 in and 512 out latency.....worse still if he's monitoring with latency inducing plugins and/or latency inducing plugins on other tracks with PDC turned on. Again worse still if the previously re-sampled stuff is further re-sampled as the effect would be cumulative.
Abe decided to just circumvent all that. Which is fair enough i guess, but for those of us who have low latency and understand the signal flow and various ways in which delays can accumulate within the signal flow, it'd be nice to have the option to turn this feature/flaw off without resorting to hardware monitoring.
edit: this has nothing to do with warping "time and space" as someone suggested below! I'm not talking about eradicating inherent digital latency here, I'm talking about the audio playing back from DISK which is (iirc!) NOT dependent on time travel, vortexes, other dimensions or any other funny stuff like that.
